Tropical Weather Latest: Helene weakens into tropical storm over Georgia after landing in Florida

Hurricane John once again weakened into a tropical storm Thursday evening as the slow-moving storm crept along the coast of the Mexican state of Michoacan, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Meanwhile, Tropical Storm Isaac strengthened Friday into a hurricane in the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean and could cause dangerous waves in parts of Bermuda, forecasters said.

Tropical Storm Joyce formed on Friday morning in the Atlantic Ocean and wasn't threatening land, forecasters said. The storm was expected to strengthen gradually through Sunday before weakening early next week.

Follow AP's coverage of tropical weather at https://apnews.com/hub/hurricanes.

Here's the latest:

Atlanta firefighters rescue a half-dozen people in Hanover West

ATLANTA — Atlanta Fire Rescue Battalion Chief Ronald Slatton said rescue efforts Friday morning helped about half a dozen people who didn’t feel safe in their homes in Hanover West, a neighborhood in north Atlanta. A creek behind some of the residences had risen to about four or five feet, he said.

“We’re just here standing by if they need us,” he said of his expectations for the rest of the day.

Shattered storefronts and mangled awnings dot downtown Valdosta

VALDOSTA, Ga. — In downtown Valdosta, Georgia, Hurricane Helene ripped the sheet metal roof from a large brick building that houses a furniture and antiques store and blew out the back wall. Bricks, plywood and twisted metal covered the grass outside, exposing old lamps, cabinets and other knickknacks in the store’s inventory.

Many shops and businesses along the tree limb-covered sidewalks of the downtown area appeared unscathed. But a few had shattered storefront windows and mangled awnings.

Electricity was out across the city and traffic moved slowly on many roads, with stoplights blacked out and trees blocking several streets.

‘My neighbors across the street got the full brunt of all of it’

ATLANTA — Stacy Quiros noticed early indications of flooding at her home in Hanover West, a neighborhood in north Atlanta, when she woke up Friday morning. She and her husband went to their basement to move important items to higher ground before it took on four inches of water.

Across the street, on lower ground, she pointed out underwater mailboxes and cars with just their roofs peeking out to an Associated Press journalist. She watched as her neighbors with flooded first floors climbed into rescue boats that took them to safety.

“My neighbors across the street got the full brunt of all of it,” she said.

Connecticut National Guard unit deploys to North Carolina

HARTFORD — The Connecticut Army National Guard’s 1-169th Aviation Regiment is providing one CH-47 Chinook helicopter and a five-soldier flight crew for approximately one week to assist North Carolina as Helene moves through the area.

The unit mobilized and deployed to North Carolina on Friday morning.

At least 11 people have died in Georgia

ATLANTA — A spokesperson for Gov. Brian Kemp says 11 people have died so far in Georgia from causes related to Hurricane Helene.

Spokesperson Garrison Douglas could not immediately provide a breakdown of where and how all the deaths occurred.

Florida officials warn residents to take safety precautions as they clean up

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Just because Hurricane Helene has passed Florida doesn’t mean that dangers are over, the state’s top emergency management official said Friday.

Hazards abound from flooded roadways, downed power lines and debris blocking roads, said Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

Guthrie urged Floridians to take safety precautions as they clean up. Hold off cleaning up debris where power lines are down, wear goggles when operating a chainsaw and put on a hard hat if available when cleaning up in a damaged building, Guthrie said.

“Just make sure you are being safe if you’re out there,” Guthrie said. “These are all preventable deaths and injuries. We can 100% prevent that.”

‘The priority now is saving lives’

RALEIGH, N.C. — North Carolina Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper said in a briefing Friday morning that there had been two storm-related deaths in the state and he expected more to come.

Close to 300 roads were closed and over 100 swift-water rescues had occurred so far, Cooper said.

He added that the storm, particularly in western North Carolina, is causing life-threatening flash flooding, numerous landslides and power outages from downed trees.

“The priority now is saving lives,” Cooper said, telling people to stay off the roads unless they were seeking higher ground.

“With the rain that they already had been experiencing before Helene’s arrival, this is one of the worst storms in modern history for parts of western North Carolina,” Cooper said.

Portions of Interstates 40 and 26 were closed due to flooding, officials said.

Emergency workers in Florida are focused on search and rescue efforts

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Around 1,500 emergency workers are focusing their efforts during the first 24 hours after Hurricane Helene’s landfall on search and rescue efforts, Florida’s top emergency management official said Friday.

In the two days following, their efforts will concentrate on securing and stabilizing affected communities, said Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

“As those sorts of rescue missions happen today, and continue, please do not go out and visit the impacted areas,” Guthrie said Friday morning at a news conference in Tallahassee. “I beg of you, do not get in their way.”

Rows of homes gone, a gaping hole in the post office and a supermarket wall missing

CEDAR KEY, Fla. — After spending the night riding out the storm and checking in on his neighbors, Michael Presley Bobbitt, 48, woke to find his town of Cedar Key littered with debris with rows of houses gone, a gaping hole clear through his post office and the wall to his local mom-and-pop supermarket missing.

“We’re feeling pretty gut-punched here in Cedar Key,” he said. “When we were fighting this in the night, however bad we thought it would be, it’s much worse in the light of day.”

Despite orders to evacuate, Bobbitt, who has lived in Cedar Key for five years, said he stayed behind to help out those who could not leave with his rescue boat and document the storm.

“All of those people that left are desperate to hear about their homes,” he said. “I’m delivering the most devastating news that they have ever got in their lives.”

Tropical Storm Joyce forms in the Atlantic

MIAMI — Tropical Storm Joyce formed Friday in the Atlantic Ocean and isn’t threatening land, forecasters said.

The storm is located about 1,325 miles (2,130 kilometers) east of the northern Leeward Islands and has maximum sustained winds of 40 mph (65 kph). It was moving northwest at about 13 mph (20 kph).

There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect, the Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said. The storm was expected to strengthen gradually through Sunday before weakening early next week.

More than 50 swift-water rescues conducted in western North Carolina county

ASHEVILLE, N.C. — In North Carolina, more than 50 swift-water rescues were conducted from floodwaters in Buncombe County.

“This is the most significant natural disaster that any one of us has ever seen in western North Carolina,” said Ryan Cole, the county’s assistant emergency services director.

Cole said during a briefing that road washouts and closures prevented authorities from responding to some emergency calls. In Asheville, crews were trying to get to a mudslide involving four homes and an undetermined number of people were unaccounted for, he said.

Historic building collapses in downtown Savannah

ATLANTA — A historic building partially collapsed in downtown Savannah as Helene moved through the city.

The Savannah Fire Department says the third story of the three-story brick building collapsed into the second floor after 2 a.m. Friday morning. The top two floors hold apartments, while the bottom floor is home to the Ordinary Pub on Broughton Street, one of the main commercial streets in the city’s historic downtown.

No injuries were reported, but fire officials declared the building unsafe to enter.

Trees are down all over Augusta

ATLANTA — Georgia State Sen. Harold Jones II said trees are down all over Augusta, where he lives, with many of them falling on houses.

“We have roads blocked here, a lot of debris damage,” Jones said Friday morning.

Jones said some neighborhoods were also seeing flooding, with trees blocking many major roads.

A falling tree kills a 2nd person in South Carolina

ANDERSON, S.C. — Authorities are reporting a second death in South Carolina from Helene.

A second person was killed Friday morning by a tree falling on a home in Anderson County, the Coroner’s Office said in a statement.

‘I was so sad, it’s my first apartment’

ATLANTA — Jalen Cruz woke up around 1 a.m. — “thankfully at the right time,” he said.

Water was just starting to trickle into the kitchen of his Atlanta apartment. What started as a “little puddle” swelled to ankle-high flooding at his ankles within 30 minutes, so he gathered some of his valuables to bring to his neighbor’s upstairs.

At its peak, the water rose to his calves, the 25-year-old painter said, meaning he has furniture that’s damaged, unfinished art submerged underwater and paint bubbling formed on his walls.

“It could’ve been a lot worse,” he said. Still, “I was so sad, it’s my first apartment.”

“Physical stuff can be replaced but just to see the state of my first home, submerged in water,” he said, looking back as brown water rushed downstream. “This is my baby.”

Iconic lake from “Dirty Dancing” overtops the North Carolina dam holding it back

RUTHERFORDTON, N.C. — Waters in the iconic lake used to film scenes from the movie “Dirty Dancing” are overtopping the dam holding them back in North Carolina.

Emergency officials in Rutherford County have started evacuating people downstream from Lake Lure and are sounding emergency sirens.

Water has been periodically released from the dam this week, but there has been too much rain to keep up, officials said.

Authorities did not indicate if the dam itself was in danger.

Lake Lure was transformed into upstate New York’s Catskill Mountains for several of the scenes in the 1987 film, including the dance scene where actor Patrick Swayze lifts Jennifer Grey out of the water.

Florida airports will reopen as state inspectors work to clear roadways

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — Airports in Florida that closed due to Hurricane Helene will be reopened on Friday, and inspectors were out examining bridges and causeways along the Gulf Coast to get them back open to traffic quickly, the state’s transportation secretary said.

Airports in Tampa, St. Pete, Lakeland and Tallahassee planned to reopen for flights, and 2,000 miles of roadway have been cleared of debris so far, Jared Perdue, secretary of the Florida Department of Transportation, said Friday morning at a Tallahassee news conference.

“Some of the causeways were underwater, so we have to inspect them and make sure they are safe to pass,” Perdue said. “We had a lot of storm surge up and down the west coast. We had a lot of roads underwater.”

A late-night evacuation in Atlanta with a newborn

ATLANTA — A neighbor knocking woke Marcus Benson on Thursday night after the rain outside — and exhaustion from a newborn baby — had lulled him to sleep. The water level was inching closer to the front door of their apartment, about eight steps up from ground level and high enough that he decided it was time to evacuate.

Benson said it took focus to get himself, his wife and his three-month-old baby through a flooded parking lot to get to the other side of their Atlanta apartment complex.

“You have your son in your arms above water trying to keep him up and you just push and try to get to safety,” Benson said.

Benson doesn’t know the status of his family’s home but is glad they are safe.

Now they just have to “let Mother Nature take its course,” the Atlanta native said, adding that his hometown’s “really changed as far as weather’s concerned.”

Georgia Power expects outages to rise

ATLANTA — Kim Greene, the CEO of Georgia Power Co. told reporters Friday she feared outages would continue to rise for the 2.6 million customers of Georgia’s only private electrical utility.

“All of that rain is leading to very saturated ground, and trees, unfortunately, will continue to fall,” Greene told reporters during a news conference in Atlanta. “So we do expect the number of outages to continue to rise. I assure you that we want to get your power back on just as safely and as quickly as possible.”

A Florida congregation must rebuild again after Helene

PERRY, Fla. — The congregation at Potter’s House Ministries church in Perry, Florida, was just weeks away from moving back into their newly renovated sanctuary after rebuilding in the wake of last year’s Hurricane Idalia. Then Hurricane Helene peeled back the brand-new roof, scattering sheets of aluminum across the church grounds.

“It’s really heartbreaking,” said parishioner Stephen Tucker, moved to tears as he surveyed the damage the morning after Helene made landfall. “I know it’s in God’s will for this to happen. And it’s by the grace of God that we’re still here.”

Tucker said it’s been one blow after another for the community he’s lived in all of his 51 years — a one, two, three punch from Idalia last August, then Debby a year later and now Helene, all making landfall within about 30 miles (48 kilometers) of each other in one county in this rural stretch of Florida’s Big Bend.

“It’s like it never stops,” he said. “Why Taylor County?”

Multiple hospitals without power in south Georgia

ATLANTA — Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said multiple hospitals in south Georgia are without power after Helene knocked out both their primary power and their generators.

Kemp said trees had fallen densely in the eastern part of the state.

“We know we still have people trapped in homes that we’re trying to cut our way into right now,” Kemp told Fox News.

“We have a lot of resources that we have on the ground already,” Kemp added. “We’re calling up additional National Guard, and we’re going to throw everything we got at it.”

Kemp said wind damage is less severe in metro Atlanta.

“The storm really stayed straight or either moved to the east a little bit, which spared some of our state from being on the dirty side of the storm. So if there’s any blessing in disguise, that’s probably it.”

‘We’re blessed it's still standing'

VALDOSTA, Ga. — The hurricane’s winds stripped away the siding from the steeple in front of Union Cathedral in Valdosta, Georgia, exposing its metal frame and littering the parking lot with shredded foam and plaster.

The storm also smashed plate glass windows by the front doors. Inside the entryway, the floor was strewn with thick glass shards, religious booklets and offering envelopes.

Pastor Wade McCrae, who preaches to 250 congregants in person most Sundays with hundreds more watching online, said the sanctuary was undamaged. Deacons were running errands to bring plywood and tools to cover the broken window. McCrae hoped to be able to hold services this Sunday.

“We’re blessed it’s still standing,” he said.

20 people in Atlanta rescued overnight by firefighters

ATLANTA — Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens tells reporters that firefighters rescued about 20 people overnight from cars or apartments imperiled by swiftly rising floodwaters.

2nd person dies in Florida after a tree fell on a home

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — A second person died in Florida after a tree fell on a home in the region where Hurricane Helene made landfall, bringing the death toll to at least six, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Friday.

The death was in Dixie County, which is in the Big Bend region of Florida, near where Helene made landfall late Thursday as a Category 4 storm.

“I pray that’s it,” DeSantis said at a news conference in Tallahassee. “But I also know these were very hazardous conditions.”

Helene was the third hurricane in more than a year to hit the Big Bend region. The damage appears to be greater than the combined damage of hurricanes Idalia in August 2023 and Debby last August, DeSantis said.

“To have something that was even bigger than those two storms causing a lot of damage, I think it’s a sense of trauma for the community,” DeSantis said. “It’s demoralizing because, it’s like, we worked on this, and now we could be potentially worse off than we were before.”

The morning after Helene

PERRY, Fla. — As the sun rose over Perry, Florida, the morning after Hurricane Helene plowed through, the sounds of roosters and generators pierced the air.

A flock of turkeys, roosters and chickens at this home off of U.S. Highway 27 survived the storm.

Helene leaves boats piled up in a Florida marina, littering the streets with mud and trash

GULFPORT, Fla. — Boats were piled up Friday on a marina in Gulfport, Florida — some just smashed up fiberglass remains.

Streets in the community located on the Gulf of Mexico in the St. Petersburg, Florida area were littered with mud, trash and tree limbs left by water that had receded by daybreak Friday.

Other streets were still covered in water several inches high. Photos posted by residents showed a pizzeria whose front window was smashed in by storm surge.

‘I just felt the whole house shake’

VALDOSTA, Ga. — Rhonda Bell and her husband were spending a sleepless night in the downstairs bedroom of their century-old home just outside Valdosta, Georgia, when Helene’s center passed early Friday in the hours after midnight.

The winds broke off tree limbs, tore away neighbors’ roof shingles and knocked down fence panels in the neighborhood with train tracks along one edge. Then came a crashing sound louder than the rest.

“I just felt the whole house shake,” Bell said after daybreak Friday.

A towering oak tree outside the house smashed through the roof of an upstairs bedroom and collapsed onto the living room below. The massive tree roots popped out of the ground, leaving a gaping muddy hole.

“ Thank God we’re both alive to tell about it,” Bell said.

Helene leaves at least 1 dead in South Carolina

COLUMBIA, S.C. — Helene cut a path of destruction across western South Carolina as the storm moved further east than forecast.

Almost 45% of homes and businesses across the entire state were without power Friday morning. Whole counties were without electricity as winds gusted to near hurricane force. Trees or other debris blocked every major road leading into Greenwood, a city of about 22,000 people about 65 miles (105 kilometers) west of Columbia, Greenwood County officials said on social media.

“We’re still trying to assess what all is going on,” said Greenwood County Emergency Services Director Derek Oliver in a brief phone call.

All but about 1,000 of the 28,000 homes and businesses in the county were without power, according to poweroutage.us.

One death has been reported in the storm so far. A tree fell on a house Friday morning in Anderson, the Anderson County Coroner’s Office said.

Storm surge deposits 2 boats in a major Hernando Beach roadway

BROOKSVILLE, Fla — Storm surge from Helene deposited at least two boats in the middle of a main roadway in Hernando Beach, Florida, according to the Hernando County Sheriff’s Office.

“Driving conditions hazardous,” the sheriff’s office said Friday.

Hernando County is about 50 miles north of Tampa.

First responders in Venice assess damage and conduct wellness checks

VENICE, Fla. — In Venice, Florida, police and fire rescue crews helped with 30 rescues of residents in coastal areas on Thursday, the city said in a social media post. The water has since receded, but teams were out Friday morning assessing damage and conducting door-to-door wellness checks.

“This morning we’re regrouping after doing some work last night with evacuating some people from some of the areas that were affected by the storm surge and the salt water intrusion to homes and low-lying areas,” Police Chief Charlie Thorpe said in a video posted on social media.

“It all started on the jetties, worked its way to Golden Beach when we had a significant storm surge there and eventually into Harbor Lights last night. We were working hard there to do whatever we needed to do for life-safety issues and we’re back in those areas this morning checking on things,” he added.

Isaac strengthens into a hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean

Isaac strengthened Friday into a hurricane in the open waters of the Atlantic Ocean and could cause dangerous waves in parts of Bermuda, forecasters said.

The storm was about 980 miles (1,577 kilometers) east-northeast of Bermuda and about 1,175 miles (1,890 km) west of the Azores, with maximum sustained winds of 75 mph (121 kph). It was heading east at 12 mph (19 kph).

There were no coastal watches or warnings in effect, but the waves could cause life-threatening surf and rip current conditions in Bermuda, the Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center said.

Potentially dangerous waves also could spread to the Azores, the center said. Isaac is expected to strengthen before gradually weakening by the end of the weekend.

Residents in Florida’s Big Bend region wake up to widespread power outages

PERRY, Fla. — Residents of Florida’s Big Bend region woke up to widespread power outages Friday morning after Hurricane Helene made landfall overnight near the mouth of the Aucilla River.

Helene slammed ashore in the largely rural stretch of Florida as a Category 4 hurricane, becoming the third hurricane to batter that swath of the state in a little over a year.

As the sun rose over U.S. Highway 27 outside of Perry, cars dodged and weaved among downed pine trees that blocked portions of the road, some ensnarled in power lines. Emergency workers were already on hand clearing debris before 8 am. The air smelled of pine needles and fresh wood — from the staggering trees shattered by the storm, some snapped in half like toothpicks.

Here’s the latest on Hurricane Helene

Authorities rescued people trapped by floodwaters and more than 3 million customers were in the dark across much of the southeastern U.S. as Hurricane Helene weakened to a tropical storm over Georgia early Friday after making landfall overnight in northwestern Florida as a Category 4 storm.

Helene came ashore amid warnings from the National Hurricane Center that the enormous system could create a "nightmare" storm surge. There were at least four storm-related deaths.

Video on social media sites showed sheets of rain coming down in Perry, Florida, near where Helene made landfall, and siding being torn off buildings. One local news station showed a home that had flipped over. The community and much of surrounding Taylor County were without power.

▶ Catch up on what happened overnight with Hurricane Helene